Waveform and Receiver Parameters Design Choices for a Reconfigurable Digital FMCW Radar

Real-time reconfigurable digital heterodyne LFMCW radar systems offer degrees of flexibility in selecting parameters for the transmitted waveform and for the digital receiver signal processing chain. These parameters are tightly-coupled and a change in any of them will affect the rest, and subsequently the entire system. We listed these parameters and performed an analysis to aid radar system designers to optimally select suitable permutations of them depending on their reconfigurability and system requirements. Deramping of a real-sampled up-going LFMCW signal was used as a basis of this study. This paper presents a brief abstract of the analysis results, with examples of the effects of different parameter permutations. We found that this analysis has enabled us to assess FPGA signal processing blocks' reconfiguration parameters, and to identify radar system boundaries/limitations. These findings will be applied to future reconfigurable radar receiver research at TuDelft.